Restaurant work has much in common with work in mercantile establishments. Continuous standing and walking and the nervous strain entailed in serving many customers are features of both occupations. Besides this, restaurant work necessitates the lifting and carrying of heavy weights which may easily be disastrous not only to the worker herself, but to her children. Dr. Harris has expressly stated his belief that such work will injure the reproductive organs of a women unless she is guarded from overstrain. The larger proportion of restaurant workers are girls and young women, who are peculiarly susceptible to overstrain because of their youth.
There is abundant evidence from the testimony of the girls themselves that restaurant work is a severe tax and that the need for limiting hours of labor is strongly felt among them. Here are quoted a few of the remarks made by them, which could be duplicated many times:
“I think it’s a shame to let a woman work twelve hours a day. I’m so tired at night I can’t do anything but go to bed.”
“I can’t keep a job longer than four months because I get so nervous.”
“This is my second week and I’m nearly dead, the hours are so long.”
“It would be the grandest thing in the world if they could do away with the twelve-hour day.”
To resist the unavoidable strain of the work, the restaurant worker must be in a normal, healthy state of mind and body. Our responsibility lies in seeing to it that conditions are such as to make this possible.
The results of fatigue do not end with the individual. It is common knowledge that health depends upon the power to resist disease. The person who has overworked is not only subject to the devastating action of fatigue poisons, but is a prey to any infections to which he may be exposed because he cannot throw them off. Working conditions which render large numbers of men and women susceptible to disease, and hence capable of spreading it, are a public menace. To allow such conditions to continue unchecked is inexcusable negligence.
These facts point directly to the crying need for the limitation of hours for women in restaurants, that the individual worker may be protected from overstrain, that the community may be guarded from the spread of contagious disease by people predisposed to infection through fatigue, and that the children of these women may be strong and capable of becoming useful citizens.